There’s actually beer in that milkshake we’re holding at this father-daughter dance.

A helpful PSA from Just Add Beer: this Sunday is Father’s Day! It’s one of my favorite made-up holidays because 1) I’m very fond of my father, and 2) the holiday-creating entities of our capitalist oligarchy have decided beer should be a big part of Father’s Day. The beverage is featured in store displays of cards, ties, and books alongside the same items geared toward cars, sports, or meat. Because that’s what American dudes do. Never mind that NONE of the men in my life define themselves using any of these stereotypes. Except beer.

He may not know it, but my father, Boyd, gave me my first real drink of alcohol, a glass of wine when I was visiting from college for a holiday. I went to Ohio University, and by all rights I should have been a heavy drinker by then, but I wasn’t. That night SNL had never been funnier and I helped myself to another slosh before bed.

This was a Bad Hair Year for us both

It’s only fitting then, that I helped him enter the world of craft beer. When I was growing up, Dad was a Busch man. I tried a can in college (having quickly embraced the drinking culture the next quarter) and wondered at my father’s fortitude. How had this man drank several of these a night for years and still maintained decent gastrointestinal health? Good God! When I was very young he referred to it as his “skunk juice,” which I took literally at first and later adopted as our code for beer in public, much to my mother’s chagrin.

Not the best view, but who’s going to turn down a free trip around Put-in-Bay?

On my trips home from school and later, DC or Boston, I slowly introduced good beer into his nightly repertoire. He was a willing and enthusiastic student. Also, a thirsty one. My father does not know the definition of restraint (or slow or small or “for God’s sake, Boyd!”) and drinks everything as fast as everything else. He shop-vacs up coffee in the mornings, chugs OJ in the afternoon, and gulps down his two nightly beers. This has become an issue really only when the beers of high abv are involved, but not really: my father is much funnier guy when intoxicated — just ask him.

One of us may be hungover…

By now my dad is a full-fledged, card-carrying craft beer-lover. One would never mistake him for a beer snob, of course, as I’ve never seen him not like any beer or ever leave a beer undrunk. But what he lacks as a connoisseur he makes up in zealousness. We were one of the few (perhaps only) father-daughter teams at the several beer festivals we’ve gone to together. I can’t even attempt to match his speed and the sheer volume of beer by two ounce samples that he ingests, but I can remind him to rinse out his glass and pause for a moment with some water. (Next year my mother gets a tribute as the best DD on the road.)

So Dad is no longer buys cartons of Busch on Friday, and at the moment is actually a Sierra Nevada man. Happy Father’s Day to a dad with great taste.